Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South (UNC Press, 2021)

Accolades:

2022 Georgia Author of the Year Winner, “Essay” category

Shortlisted Book, 2022 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and The Pop Conference

A 2022 Georgia Center for the Book “Books All Georgians Should Read” Selection

A Rolling Stone Magazine “Best Music Books of 2021” Selection

A Reckon South “25 of the Best Books to Come Out of the South in 2021” Selection

An Atlanta Magazine “Best of Atlanta 2021” Recognition: Scholarly Read

This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post–civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone, a blend of funk, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work of other culture creators—including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural possibilities for black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era. Andre 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but also contemporary American society as a whole.

Chronicling Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary southern black identity.